North Carolina native Chuck Wheeler remembers when the OutSouth Queer Film Festival, then called the North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, included protests from the Christian Coalition of America. He remembers coming out in the late 1970’s and feeling scared and awkward. And he remembers when the film festival began—first with films on cassettes, then DVDs, and now, streaming.
Wheeler, now mostly retired, is the festival manager and has been in attendance since it launched in 1995—starting as a volunteer, then working in the festival’s development, and now in programming. Wheeler grew up in the eastern part of the state, until moving to Durham for college at Duke University. Durham soon became his safe haven—something he hopes the festival can continue to be for all members of the LGBTQ community.
This year’s OutSouth festival runs from Thursday, August 8th through Thursday, August 15. Individual tickets are $15 and are available online, in person at the Carolina Theatre box office, or by calling the theater.
“Durham is like this oasis in the middle of adversity,” Wheeler says. “Our queer culture is thriving in this city, and I’m so proud of Durham and Raleigh and Chapel Hill, but I just think there’s something very special about Durham.”
The film festival is still recovering from COVID-19 and its years of virtual programming, Wheeler says, but its numbers are getting stronger. OutSouth is the second-largest LGBTQ film festival in the Southeast and has films across different genres, including documentaries, comedies, dramas, fantasies, horror films, animations, and more. Its focus is on LGBTQ storylines and Wheeler says this year one of the festival’s main goals is to find a range of films representative of people from all walks of life.
“I want everybody in our community to have a voice,” Wheeler says.
Durham filmmaker Ciera Thompson’s Take Note is one of the short films being screened at the festival. Thompson, who is now based in Atlanta says telling queer stories in the South specifically has felt purposeful.
“It’s like it all feels very real, these conversations that we’re having—no matter where I would live, I would want to be telling queer stories,” Thompson says. “[But] being in the South, I feel like I’m more faced with the importance of those stories.”
Thompson described her film as a “love letter to educators.” In Take Note, a middle school teacher ends up coming out to her classroom in order to help two students who are developing feelings for each other but don’t have support from their families.
Roger Mason is a director and actor in Lavender Men. Premiering at OutSouth, the historical fantasy follows a stage manager who goes through a series of uncomfortable situations and, as they heal, conjures the vision of a love affair between Abraham Lincoln and his secretary Elmer Ellsworth.
“This fantasy is partially about imagining a love that they don’t have in life, but it’s also about understanding a source of the kinds of erasure and hatred and bias that keep them out of the queer family in a full and complete and embraced way,” Mason says.
Outsouth queer Film Festival over the years
This festival is particularly special to Mason. They studied film at the University of North Carolina, Asheville for a few semesters and says this is where they began to understand the power of living history.
“I believe life is a series of full circles and just constantly spinning around looking for the truth, but it’s right in front of us the whole time,” Mason says.
Including different viewpoints and focusing on diversity has been particularly important to Chuck Wheeler in today’s political climate, he says. At OutSouth, when it was called the North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, he remembers protestors at the event up until about 2015. The protests were not violent, he says, though protestors called on attendees to repent, saying that otherwise they would go to hell.
While the protests have stopped, Wheeler says that he feels things are getting worse, with conservative legislators intent on rolling back rights—and not back just to 2015, but back to 1969, referencing the Stonewall riots where members of the LGBTQ community fought back after continued harassment.
“They want to take away everything, they want to take away marriage,” Wheeler says. “It’s as if we would be going back.”
Growing up gay in North Carolina was not easy for Wheeler and he was closeted until after college, he says. But, being immersed in the city of Durham is what gave him the courage to come out, he says, the year after graduating in 1976.
Even living in Durham, coming out was hard, Wheeler says. At that time before online dating and other LGBTQ spaces were normalized, Wheeler says the actual act of coming out was difficult—he didn’t know where to go or who to tell he was gay and he faced harassment, including physical violence. Then, in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic began and things got worse. Wheeler says most of his friends died from AIDS complications.
Through it all, Wheeler looked to film to make sense of his sexuality and fell in love with it.
“You find in film, especially before it became okay to be gay, you find all these coded messages because a lot of the Hollywood elite were closeted,” Wheeler says.
Wheeler returned to Duke in the 1990s for his master’s in film and says at the time, Duke was the epicenter of queer studies. While he never finished his dissertation, he learned invaluable lessons about himself.
“That’s when I decided it doesn’t matter, I am who I am and so that set me free,” Wheeler says.
Part of what Mason loves is the community that is created in these queer art spaces. Mason says while they have never been to OutSouth before, they’ve heard it described as not only a social event but as a safe haven.
“They’re meeting places where we can join forces and sometimes plan for future projects and future ideations that will indubitably change the face of American cinema,” Mason says. “What I look forward to when I go to festivals is the chance to exchange ideas with people of shared value systems and of different value systems that will enhance my own perspective on art and art making.”
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